While I've Got You On the Line...

Won't you please let me introduce you to the newest addition to my Blogroll -- a superbly thoughtful blogger, Stoic's Delight, who also happens to be a Close Personal Friend of Mine?

I had worried that he'd throw the blogging thing into a cocked hat after a few tries, but he seems to have caught the bug and now seems to post fairly regularly.

Stoic's Delight, everyone! Post some comments! Encourage the man! He thrives on attention!

I Come From the Land of Ice and Snow

I find rather ineffably hilarious my most recent Pop-Culture Discovery -- namely, that Robert Planet's wordless howl at the outset of "The Immigrant Song" is exactly the same melodic phrase that adorns the theme-song of "Get Smart." The thought puts me in such a fabulous mood that I can fortitudinously bear your schadenfreude-laden giggles at my tale of woe with the Triumph....

I haven't yet named the thing yet, but I'm willing to entertain suggestions. Think of a capricious person who constantly squirts oil onto the floor and won't rise to a vigorous kicking....

I took the Oily Beast (© John Morrish) down to the local gas station, a distance of some five or six miles, to tank up in preparation for a practice run around Short Hill. Having filled the tank, I kicked to start (her?) up again.

And kicked.

And kicked.

Nothing would bring (her?) to life. Absolutely nothing. My right leg was absolutely knackered from the effort.

The headlamp wasn't shining, and the ammeter on (her?) headlamp showed an alarming nothingness. Quite clearly, something was desperately wrong with the electrical system. I asked the gas-station owner if it was OK to leave (her?) there for the night; luckily, our daughters are coevals at the local school, and we knew each other noddingly.

I went home and spent a very uncomfortable night, tossing and turning and wondering what kind of pig in a poke I'd just bought. The next morning, Wonder Woman and I drove my truck to the station with a stout length of rope. She towed me home -- an absolutely terr-o-fying bit of driving, if I may confess it.

I called the fellow who'd sold me the bike, Randy Creel, of Randy's Cycle Service and Restoration, who was superbly helpful in walking me through a set of diagnostics that isolated the problem to the battery, which was, simply, old. I bought a new battery, installed it -- a quite thrillingly dangerous procedure involving pouring extremely dangerous chemicals into a box and hooking a 2-amp trickle charger to it -- and now it starts like a sex kitten on roofies (JC? Any hints for a name?).

Twenty Flight Rock

Took the newly street-legal Triumph out on its shakedown cruise in the early evening yesterday. The length of Mountain Road and back, about 20 miles overall. Trepidacious and tentative at first, by about Mile 4 I was whooping with glee. Everything I'd been afraid of -- our dirt road, the bike's weight and power, cornering and handling -- was an absolute piece of cake. Today is too damned hot to ride, but maybe this evening I'll take another training run.

Apparently, and somewhat unwittingly, I have acquired an Identity with this '64 Triumph. I've been looking around the Net for info on it, and the most salient thing I'd found was that Steve McQueen rode the previous year's model in The Great Escape. Now I've discovered that this bike was popular with café racers in Britain, who chopped it for speed and handling. What I truly didn't know is that these guys were the Rockers, of Mods-and-Rockers fame. Teds. Quiffs. Sidies. Drainies. Leather.

They had a practice called "record racing." Gather at the transport caf'. Somebody puts Eddie Cochrane's "Twenty Flight Rock" on the juke. The instant the needle hits, you go. You have to complete a circuit and be back in the parking lot before the record is over.

Clearly, I have some Hairstyle Issues to deal with. And I suddenly find myself desperately in need to find a copy of The Girl Can't Help It...

Rzzzzzz!

The Time: 1999 or so.

The Place: Somewhere in the desolation of the Northern Virginia suburbs.

I was returning with Freddie from a Cub Scout camping trip. Bone-tired from not having slept at all in a miserable pup-tent on the torturous forest floor, disgusted with the company I'd been forced into for two days -- let's face it; I wouldn't have befriended most of the dullards who made up the Cub Scout troop parents if the choice had been up to me, and the kind of nitwit who enjoys leading a bunch of eight-year-olds through "On Top of Old Smokey" while toasting marshmallows can only be characterized as a complete twat -- I needed something Seriously Transgressive to chase away the anomie.

Freddie, who'd slept as little as me, was dossed in the back seat. I searched the CD carrier and found it: "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" by the Mothers of Invention. The perfect record! Take this, you boozhy cocksuckers!

Didja Get Any Onya... Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask... Toads of the Short Forest... Yes... yes...! This is doing the trick! I am not some goddamned Cub Scout Dad in khaki Dockers driving a fucking minivan through the 'burbs! No! I am a Zappa Fan!

I heard a stirring in the back seat. Freddie had been awake and listening.

"Dad?"

"Yes, my son? How may I help you?"

"Why's his guitar want to kill her mommy?"

Ah, life.

My first attempt at a GarageBand recording, back in, what, 2003? was My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama. I was experimenting with the loops that came with that marvelous program, found this neat-o N'Awlins kind of drum thing, and it just grew organically out of that. I sequenced the bass using an acoustic bass patch, laid down a rhythm guitar vamp, and then just played the shit out my Strat. Sometime when I'm at a loose end I may feed the original file into Logic to see if I can't give the recording a little more testicular fortitude, but I kinda like it the way it is.

My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama (pops)

My Only One-Sentence Post Ever

Apparently, this new purchase of mine poses more dangers than I thought.

The Cat and the Chorus Pedal

I know this is more than a week out of date, but here goes anyway...

A plot point in the last episode of "The Sopranos" revolved around a rather spooky cat, who gives Paulie dyspepsia by staring at a photo of the departed Christopher -- even after it's been moved to another place. "The abstract shapes, or something," Tony says unconvincingly.

Tell you, cats do bizarre stuff.

Our Paco, long departed now, had a truly weird affection for a piece of guitar equipment I owned. I didn't have a dedicated room for music in our old Takoma Park place, back in the Eighties, and I used to park my Strat in the dining room. My little Fender Eighty-Eight amp was there, and I had a Boss Stereo Chorus stompbox on the floor.

I'd come home to find the cat curled up around the chorus pedal. Sleeping right on top of it, huddled around it like it was a teddy bear. It couldn't possibly have been a comfortable thing -- it was a metal box, an inch-and-a-half high and maybe five inches by three. Twiddly-dials sticking out of the top surface.

This wasn't even close to a unique, one-time-only thing. The cat loved the goddamned chorus pedal. Every day I'd come home, and there'd be Paco, curled up around this thing, purring gently and probably dreaming about catching and devouring Andy Summers.

It ran on a nine-volt battery; it wasn't as it it was warm or anything. I can't imagine it was emitting any kind of pleasurable vibration -- it felt like a cold little steel box to me.

I'll never be able to explain it.

I'm Off Again

Up to Noo Yawk for an evening of fun & frolic with the NudeCritics crowd. In order to justify the trip to my employers, and blag a ride on the company shuttle plane, I have to do some (ecch!) work tomorrow, but until then it's Breakfast at Tiffany's on some rooftop on the Yupper West Side.

Meantime, try to talk me out of this thing, Go ahead: Try.


Just looking at it, a thin line of drool forms on my chin.

Buck Fees

While I was returning our lawn to bourgeois respectability yesterday, my mower annoyed some stinging insect, which manifested its displeasure by drilling me just over my left eyebrow. As it didn't hurt very much, I suspect the offending creature to have been a yellowjacket wasp, whose stings aren't particularly painful unless you piss off a whole hiveful of them and they attack en masse. (Personal experience talking, here.)

I didn't think any more of it until I began to notice some difficulty seeing out of my left eye. Taking a shower after the hot work, I glimpsed my face in the bathroom mirror to find that the eyelid was quite alarmingly swollen. As the day progressed, the swelling around the whole eye increased to the point where I couldn't see out of it at all.

Not a terribly vain man, I was nonetheless rather disturbed at my new Elephant-Man look. As common sense dictates, I took some of the antihistamine Benadryl, which had little effect save to put me in the absolute vilest mood. The constant pressure on my eyeball gave me a
blinder of a headache, too.

I woke up this morning to find that the eyelid was even more swollen than when I'd gone to bed. The swelling's gone down a bit now, mid-morning, but co-workers are still looking at me slantendicular and asking if I've been in a fight. And the headache's returned.

OK, you little yellow cocksucker: You win. I was wrong and you were right. I do not belong in your world, and I was trespassing with my big, loud, carbon-belching mower. I'm sorry! Uncle!

Can we call it quits now?

No Sandwiches, Now

I find the atmosphere just right to ask the following question, one that has bugged me for years:

If offered a Perfect Ideal World, where Tony would never find out and consign you to slumber with the finny denizens of the deep, and where your own spousal unit would be equally uninclined to vengeful wrath, who would you do?

Carmela Soprano, or Meadow Soprano?


Me: Carm. As long as she asked nicely. I have my own reasons.

But I'd love to hear your own rationale.

Paul Is Not Dead

(Crossposted at Nude Critics)

Well that was me
Royal Iris
On the river
Merseybeatin’
With the band
That was me

There will come a time -- distressingly soon, I have a feeling -- that the only Beatle who isn't dead is Paul McCartney. I don't say this because I have some inside track on the state of Ringo Starr's health -- I fondly wish him a long and happy existence -- but because the Gods of Irony work that way.

June 18th will be Sir Paul's 65th birthday -- meaning (among other things) that his new solo album, Memory Almost Full, will have been written and recorded at that once unimaginably far-off age of 64. Far from having rented a cottage in the Isle of Wight (if it's not too dear), McCartney's last decade has been noteworthy for tumult and chaos. Of the record's title, he says,

The album title came after I had finished everything. For me, that’s when they normally come, with the exception of maybe Sgt. Peppers, otherwise I don’t think I have ever made an album with The Beatles, Wings or solo where I have thought of a title and a concept. I was thinking about what would sum the whole thing up and ‘Memory Almost Full’ sprung to mind. It’s a phrase that seemed to embrace modern life; in modern life our brains can get a bit overloaded.

I Am Not Now, Nor Have I Ever Been, Farmer MacGregor

It would take a cold heart indeed not to melt upon finding these li'l guys in the lawn:

Here's Flopsy:


An' here's Mopsy:


Wonder Woman wouldn't let the dogs out after she found these two this afternoon. She kept hoping that Mrs. Cottontail would come along, scold her charges for running off, and chivvy them back home for chamomile tea and biscuits. By my arrival home, she had not appeared, so I gathered them up gently in a tea-towel and carried them one by one into the rather overgrown blueberry patch and laid them carefully out of sight behind the milkweed. By the time I'd brought Mopsy up, Flopsy had already hippity-hopped off into the bushes, so I think they'll be safe.

Do You Need Anybody?

In Which I Forgive Kenyon College for Making a Man of Me

On the drive out to central Ohio for my 25th college reunion, it became rather urgent that I obtain a copy of Sergeant Pepper to play very loudly in my car -- my copy seemed to have taken a bunk from my CD shelves. The day of the drive was the fortieth anniversary of the release of that earthshaking album, and since the weekend was to be dedicated to wallowing in nostalgia, the proper musical accompaniment seemed incumbent.

On the way to a record store in a shopping mall in Martinsburg, West Virginia, I walked past a shop that catered to the fashion needs of the Urban Gentleman -- oversized baseball caps meant to be worn sideways, enormous throwback basketball jerseys -- you know the thing. In the window a rather raffish porkpie hat stopped me in my tracks. I must have that hat!

And have it I did. It occurred to me that the thing might occasion a nice little joke: I imagined my classmates whispering behind my back, Oh Jesus, look at poor Jingo -- he's gone bald as a billiard ball on top and he's wearing that ridiculous hat to disguise his shame; that's just pathetic! Cue me removing the thing to reveal my Crowning Glory, a full thatch of luxurious hair without a single streak of gray.

Old Kenyon, scene of most of my social and sexual humiliations

Arrived at Gambier, I ankled into the old bank, now the registration office for the returning alumni. I announced my name to an assistant at the desk, and was immediately floored when Rory Mach, registering at the next table over, cackled, "Neddie who?"

Rory is absolutely one of my favorite human beings in all of the world of space and time, with a marvelous, ever-ready great booming laugh that makes you feel glad to be alive. I had no idea he was coming -- and he likewise had no clue I was to be there. We were once so close that it's quite possible that our first children were conceived on the same night, after a bibulous dinner at a nice restaurant outside Washington. The kids were born within hours of each other. Time and distance and natural laziness on both our parts have drawn us apart, but after this weekend I will move heaven and earth to make sure that's no longer true.

Rory Mach and Offspring. No -- seriously. Her name is Offspring.

Rory and I got to yacking, and I mentioned my blog. He asked the name, and when I told him, he said, "You're Neddie Jingo?" Turns out the sumbitch was lurking at NewCritics, with no idea who I was. Now he's posting there as well, and has recently started a blog of his own. In a world of -- what are we up to now? eight billion people? -- and even given the self-selecting and self-referential nature of the Blogosphere, I'm calling this coincidence nothing short of a miracle.

People.

People. A congenital misanthrope, I don't like a lot of people. But Matt's comment on a recent post of mine was a perfect description of the weekend: "the connections I invariably make with people whom I hardly knew when we were in school together." While in the Old Days I knew most of the folks in that little kaffeeklatsch above (actually, it should probably be referred to as a wasserklatsch), it's really only been since graduation that I've come to know and feel affection for them as friends rather than classmates. I also met many new friends, and filled in some blanks with people I'd only ever met online -- Will Divide, for example, is as charming in person as he is in email, as is Axiomatic Apricot from the Chumps.

Ascension Hall, scene of most of my academic humiliations

My fraternity, the Peeps o' Kenyon (motto: "Purity and Accuracy" -- which should give you some idea) survives, if all its mural artwork does not. Some absolute gooberhead painted over the mural reproduction of the Grateful Dead Steal Your Face album cover that greeted visitors in the foyer of Old Kenyon. I really enjoyed the little two-inch-high graffito that replaced it, though:


Two nights of fairly hearty partying did take a bit of an emotional toll on your correspondent. Sunday morning, a twinge of melancholia already setting in, I regretfully packed up the effects and motored off homeward. Again, I thought it incumbent to leave campus with Sergeant Pepper blasting at top volume out of the windows of the car. I grinned a grinny grin and set my porkpie at a jaunty angle as the windshield rattled: "It was twenty years ago today..."

But wouldn't you know it -- I'd forgotten about the second song. That damned second song!

Do you need anybody?
I need somebody to love
Could it be anybody?
I just need someone to love...

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm, gonna try with a little help from my friends
Oh, I get high with a little help from my friends
Yes, I get by with a little help from my friends
With a little help from my friends...

I'm afraid I blubbed a bit.

Rory, Nick, Abby Abigail, Chris, Tor, DeeDee, Chucker, Joe G., Kyle H., Elise B., and everybody else I forgot to mention -- next time, let's all do this:

Steve Gilliard

I've been out of the loop all weekend -- post on the Reunion is in the making -- so I hadn't heard the dreadful news that Steve Gilliard had died.

That's a terrible blow. He was one of the great ones. I really enjoyed his righteous passion; The News Blog was absolutely a daily must-read for me.

My condolences to Jen and the News Blog team.

"We Fight Back" indeed.

Before I set off on my eight-hour drive to Gambier, I just wanted to say a couple of things:

1. Eugene Robinson has the thing well in hand; and

2. It was forty years ago today.

I'm Off

Things may (or may not -- I'm bringing the MacBook) get a little quiet around here for a couple of days.

I'm going to attend my 25th class reunion at Kenyon Kollege, traveling tomorrow, coming home Sunday. I'm going alone; when I broached the topic of attendance with Wonder Woman (an alumna; we met and fell in love there), she pointed out that the kiddoes have their final exams this week, and that somebody needs to crack the whip on that. With no detectable malice in her voice, she waved and said, "Have a good time!"

Fellow Chump of Choice Will Divide (hey! Guess what! That's not his real name!) is a fraternity brother, although I've never met him -- he graduated the year I matriculated. He'll be there, and I'm very much looking forward to finally meeting him.

I checked the list of my classmates who've registered. One name in particular stood out -- somebody I've always wished I'd smashed his lights out back in 1978, '79, and again in 1981. I will have a very hard time being in the same room with him, having relived the memory over and again of the casual assholery he was wont to display. (JC, remember TW?)

As an adult, I've become rather less fearless than I was as a callow youth. I'm now far more willing to call an asshole an asshole. I do hope our paths don't cross.

Other than that, I'm rather looking forward to this. I may post some photos of the campus -- it is unspeakably pretty.

That photo above is of Old Kenyon, a building I was privileged to occupy for two years. There is an acoustic tile ceiling in the third-floor bathroom that, if pushed, affords access to the ordinarily locked bell-tower. A tale that still makes me laugh 26 years later is inherent in that fact. There are two people in the world who will laugh with me at that observation, and at least one of them is registered for this reunion.

That's why I'm looking forward to this.

Chicken of the Sea for Horses of the Meadow

A haymeadow near my home (click photo to enlarge). I think it's a wonderfully surreal sight, all these cans of tuna strewn higgledy-piggledy about this bucolic landscape.

I've never been able to take a photo of Short Hill that makes it look as big as it actually is.

One

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Why We Always Keep Our Shovel Collection Up to Date

Been a bit of a deathy year chez Jingo.

Not only did we lose Wonder Woman's dad, but BB the budgie and Zippy the guinea pig also went the way of all flesh, within a few weeks of each other this winter.

The deaths of these pets were not exactly earth-shattering. You don't get much love back from a guinea pig or a caged bird. Zippy lost most of my affection when he bit me repeatedly years ago while I was holding him and trying to make friends. The kids, whose pets these originally were, didn't take care of them, and the task of feeding them and changing their cages fell to Wonder Woman, who, I think, mainly regarded them as a minor pain in the ass.

BB was the first to go. He'd had a tumor under his wing, and it was only a matter of time. Now, when a budgie shuffles off this mortal coil, custom dictates that one gather the family at the graveside, say a few words of remembrance, perhaps a few (in our case) secular ceremonial words, and shovel the dirt back into the hole. This is, I suppose, in aid of attaining what the funeral industry is pleased to call closure.

Now, I think that if one of our dogs had died, we -- and the surviving dog -- would have been absolutely gutted. I'm typing this now on our bed, Wondie is napping next to me, and both pups are curled up between us. They are without question beloved members of our family, as much our children as our human offspring.

But BB and Zippy -- not so much. So these burial rituals were, how to put it, deferred. It was cold out, the ground was hard, and we had more pressing things to attend to. Wonder Woman respectfully wrapped their corpses in old towels, and preserved the mortal remains as they do at any morgue -- she put them in the freezer, to be taken out and buried with full honors when the weather warmed.

Now it's not our kitchen freezer she put them in. Please understand this. That would be gross. No, she put them in our second freezer, which we have in the garage. We keep no food in there, only extra ice and a bottle or two of medicinal vodka. I do use the freezer to store the summer's crop of fruits, but it's all bagged and sealed shut. No corpse/cherry contact took place.

In the lower part of the unit, the refrigerator section, we keep bottled water, extra milk, and beer. Last week, I noticed that a beer (a Sam Adams Summer Ale for those keeping score) that I'd brought in to have with dinner was not nearly as cold as I'd like it to be. Semi-tepid, 's what it was. Next I noticed that the cherries, which I'd pitted and frozen with sugar-syrup for use in pies and the like, had begun to show signs of thawing. A few days ago, when I opened the freezer to consult that bottle of vodka (I had a bad case of the dropsy, accompanied with the blistering marthambles, and any practitioner of medicine would have prescribed the very same thing), I noticed...a smell.

Oh. Dear. God.

Now you remember that broken shovel from earlier this week? That was my only tool for breaking ground; the next best thing I have is a gardening trowel, and it would be like trying to pole-vault with a toothpick to try to dig a grave with it. So today found me at the hardware store replacing that shovel. The instant I returned home, I raced with the new shovel to the orchard, picked a nice shady spot, and dug two holes a foot or two deep. Then I donned latex gloves, took the soggy packages out of the now nearly completely moribund freezer, walked quickly but calmly to the graves, and performed the Sacred Ritual: "GoodbyeBBandZippyyouwerenicefriends and I'M REALLY SORRY!"

So that's why, when your shovel breaks, you replace it immediately. One of life's lessons.

We're also shopping for a new fridge. Anybody know where I can get a flamethrower to sterilize the old one?

A Moral Dilemma Presents Itself

Weirdest thing happened this afternoon.

I'm sitting at my desk, squirreling away at some technical documentation. My cell phone rings.

This pretty much never happens. The cell is for emergencies and for telling Wonder Woman
I'm going to be late for dinner. I've given my cell number to about four people outside my immediate family. I've always detested the idea that I can be immediately reachable at any moment. One values one's privacy.

The display shows an unfamiliar but local number. I answer.

A recording begins:

"You have a collect call from [at this point a burst of unintelligible static is played] at the Loudoun County Jail. To accept this call, press one. To hear the fee for accepting this call, press two."

Whaaa...?

Somebody who has my cell phone number is in jail?

I ran down the list of people who know my number. The likelihood of any of them being in chokey at two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon is vanishingly small.

What to do? What to do? If the caller had been a little more clear in identifying himself (the voice was, if garbled, at least definitely male), I might have been able to make an informed decision.

I pressed two, to hear what accepting the call would set me back. Fifty cents, according to the recording.

So I was faced with the dilemma: Four bits to tell some hapless miscreant he'd called the wrong number -- perhaps even wasted the one phone call Hollywood has convinced us is all you get when you're busted? Or hang up?

And if I hung up, would the goober at the other end think that whoever he thought he was dialing wouldn't even accept the piddling charge it took to inform the Outside World that he'd been nabbed by John Law?

After a moment's consideration, I hung up. I reckoned that if the Hapless M. really needed to talk to me, he'd call back.

The phone didn't ring again.

Later edit: Scam. Thanks, J.

Why Yes, I Am Checking Out Your Ass, Part II

Weekend Fashion Advice for the Ladies from the Heterosexual Male

As we steam into Memorial Day Weekend and the official start of summer, it's time to make the following pronouncement, as an act of Public Service:

No woman -- that's no woman in all of human history -- has ever looked bad in a flouncy knee-length flower-print skirt and strappy wedge-heeled rope-soled sandals.

Not a single one. You can look it up.